Wireless

Configuring wireless cards in Linux can often be a painful process, particularly since very few hardware companies release open-source drivers for their products.

Contents 1 Buying a new card 2 Is my card detected? 3 GUI tools 4 Command line tools 5 Connecting to the network 6 Using Windows drivers

Buying a new card

Atheros and Ralink are reportedly the two best chipset brands, as native Linux drivers are available for their cards. (Links go to a list of cards based on their chipsets.) LinuxWireless.org has helpful information about setting up these adapters. If you want to check if your card is supported on Linux, visit http://linux-wless.passys.nl/.

“Official” support from the Ultima developers may not be completely available for native drivers, due to limited hardware availability, but you may be able to find instructions for other distributions such as Slackware or Gentoo that work fine.

Is my card detected?

ifconfig -a displays all interfaces which are currently available, even if down. (If no arguments are given, ifconfig displays the status of the currently active interfaces.) If your wireless interface is not there type as root in a terminal lspci or lsusb. Analyze the output and copy/paste the ID number into google to find more information about your card. You will probably end up with the module that should be loaded into the kernel: modprobe your_module. Sometimes the firmware must also be downloaded and put into /lib/firmware. If modprobe works you may want to edit /etc/rc.d/rc.modules or /etc/modprobe.conf in order to automate the module loading.

GUI tools

There are GUI tools in Ultima Linux that are supposed to help you configure your wireless network. They can be run from the console: kcmshell kcmwifi and kwifimanager. You can launch them from graphical KMenu too: Kmenu->Settings->Wireless Network and Kmenu->Internet->KWifiManager. If they fail to help you or you don`t know what ESSID is, read below.

Command line tools

iwlist your_interface scan gives the list of Access Points and Ad-Hoc cells in range of your interface (for example: eth1), and optionally a whole bunch of information about them (Quality, Frequency, Mode and ESSID which is the identifying name of a wireless network - strictly it is the identifying name of a wireless access point.) Try iwlist alone to see its options.

iwconfig - the most important command that is used to set the parameters of the network interface which are specific to the wireless operation (for example: the password). Usage examples:
iwconfig your_interface essid "access point name" configures your interface to connect to your access point.
iwconfig your_interface key "s:your_password" configures your interface to use the given text string as your WEP password, alternatively with a hexadecimal key:
iwconfig your_interface key HEX_KEY

Connecting to the network

While your wireless interface is already configured (let`s assume it is eth1), you can connect to the network with
dhcpcd -t 15 -d eth1
(where -t flag denotes timeout for connection in seconds).

In order to get automatic connection at system boot you probably need to change one of these files:
/etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf
/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf
Sometimes this does not work. Then you can add the sequence of commands which led you to success to /etc/rc.d/rc.local, for example such a sequence:
iwconfig eth1 essid default
iwconfig eth1 key "s:qwerty"
dhcpcd -t 15 -d eth1

Using Windows drivers

NdisWrapper lets the Linux kernel use Windows XP-compatible wireless drivers, for situations where a “native” driver is not available. For some chips such as Broadcom this may work better than the native drivers; with others, such as anything by NETGEAR, it’s the only option.

Note that some companies (most notably NETGEAR) do not provide 64-bit drivers, even on Windows, so you should either use Ultima Linux x86 Edition, or better yet, replace your wireless card.